Making it part of the collection

Every year, thousands of specimens are collected and brought to the Natural History Museum to be studied, preserved and looked after in the collections. Each specimen that arrives needs to be prepared, identified and labelled.

These videos highlight some of the ways specimens are prepared for our collections, such as plant mounting, pinning and slide preparation.

Many of the specimens are fragile and need to be handled as little as possible, whereas others are unstable and sensitive to changing light and moisture conditions. So specimens are preserved in many different ways. No method will keep every characteristic of an organism in its original state but the aim is to preserve as many of the key features as possible.